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Children flock feeding centres

Published:Friday | August 19, 2011 | 12:00 AM
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A relative of Moktar Hassan Garad of southern Somalia lowers the body of Garad's 5-year-old boy into a grave in a refugee camp in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Tuesday, August 16. The World Food Programme said Saturday that it is expanding food- distribution efforts in famine-ravaged Somalia, where the UN has estimated that only 20 per cent of people needing aid are able to receive it because an al-Qaida-linked group controls large portions of the country. - ap photos
A boy in his father's cornfield who subsists on a diet of grain, but reliance on one food crop leaves the family vulnerable to crop failure and malnourishment, in Shebedino in the south of Ethiopia.
A malnourished child from southern Somalia cries as he sits outside a makeshift shelter in a refugee camp in Mogadishu, Somalia, on Monday, August 15.
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SHEBEDINO, Ethiopia (AP):

Malnourished children are flocking into feeding centres in this forested corner of southern Ethiopia, after a drought in East Africa extended into this normally fertile region.

While the famine in southern Somalia has grabbed headlines, southern Ethiopia is teetering on the brink of a food crisis. The Ethiopian government says 250,000 people need food aid amid what the UN says is the worst drought in 60 years. An aid organisation and agriculture officials say the number of people who need emergency food aid in Ethiopia is bigger, around 700,000.

The rains never came, as they usually do late February to the end of May. If they fail again in August, there won't be a harvest in September.

People without food aid will "definitely be in trouble", World Food Programme officer Yohannes Desta said. "Do these people have enough resilience to survive? I don't think so."

About 1.3 million southerners received aid earlier this year from a government safety net programme that ended in June, Yohannes said. Most of those people, whom he calls the "poorest of the poor", still require emergency relief, but instead must scrape by on the few crops they have left or through the goodwill of more fortunate family members or neighbours.